


Sunflower

by EmeraldTulip



Series: that's how the light gets in [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, Coma, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, Will Byers Has Powers, but a good one, this one has a linear narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 14:04:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18572998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldTulip/pseuds/EmeraldTulip
Summary: Mike is struck, then, by the full and sudden understanding of what he’s doing, what they’re doing. He almost pulls back—almost, because then he is struck by Will’s sharp features in the dim moonlight, the way the dark flecks stand out in his irises, and he’s frozen.Will’s smile fades slightly the longer the silence stretches on, replaced by a worried look. His fingers tighten on Mike’s jaw. Mike almost jolts as a rush of static passes through him, but that might just be because Will is looking so intently at him. “Mike,” Will says again. “Are you okay?” He hesitates. “Is this okay?”And Mike almost scoffs, because of course it’s okay. He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t okay. He’d be pulling away right now, or even long gone already. But he’s not—he’s not.-Or: monsters burn, heroes fall, and people change. And if people are left in the dust, well, Mike has learned to move fast.-Or: Like so much else, it starts with Will.





	Sunflower

**Author's Note:**

> an accompaniment to/linearization of my fic, [Dark](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18483691). they don't necessarily need to be read together, it's all about what flow you want.  
> anyway, enjoy!

**_Day 0_ **  
  
It starts with Will.  
  
He clambers to his feet, dusts off his jeans even though there’s nothing to brush away, and ambles over to a corner. The others follow suit, dispersing around Mike’s basement to either think or talk.  
  
It’s the final stand.  
  
None of them quite know how they’ve gotten here, now—Mike least of all. How can he be standing with his best friends, watching two of the greatest people in his life walk away into some dark unknown?  
  
They’re not gone yet. They’re standing to the side, conversing lowly as everyone clatters around and shouts, getting prepared, setting up. And looking at them—at El and Will, at Lucas and Dustin and Max, at Nancy and Steve and Jonathan, at Hopper and Joyce—well. His heart swells with the feelings he has for these people. Mike’s parents might never understand, but his friends—they do.  
  
And in the midst of life and chaos, he looks around this room filled with the most vibrant, powerful, extraordinary humans he's come to know as his true, self-made family, and he thinks that there's nothing he can’t really handle if he is surrounded by good people like them.

* * *

**_Day 1_ ** ****  
  
“I don’t understand,” Hopper mumbles, fussing over the daughter he has currently lying on a makeshift mattress in Joyce’s house beside Will. “They should be dead, but they’re not. And in that case they should be awake, but they’re not.”  
  
Max’s eyes slide between the two limp bodies. “Maybe they’ll wake up soon.”  
  
“Maybe,” Lucas huffs, “but then why won’t they wake up now?”  
  
No one has an answer for that, and after a few moments of something that feels too much like grief, Joyce tries to shoo everyone from the room.  
  
“Mike, sweetheart—“ she starts, but Mike won’t get up from his chair.  
  
“I need to stay with them,” he says lowly, seriously, and she seems to get it. She closes the door behind her, and the minute it clicks Mike lets his head fall into his hands.  
  
“You’re alive,” he mutters into his palms. “You’re alive, dammit, both of you. Why is there always some complication?”  
  
And just for a second, Mike thinks he hears a familiar voice: _God knows you don’t need more_ complicated _, huh? We’ll try to ease this up in you._

He looks up and Will is still asleep, El is still asleep.

Maybe he’s losing it. Maybe he’s already out of his mind. But a tiny part of his head, the part that knows that the impossible is real and that lightning sometimes does strike twice, thinks enough for his whole brain in that moment.  
  
_We’ll survive,_ he thinks. Demands, almost—orders the universe to make it so. _We’re gonna live._  
  
And it might be his imagination, but he thinks he sees a smile on Will’s face.

* * *

**_Day 2_ ** ****  
  
His hands won’t stop shaking.  
  
He’s been sitting in the same chair for two days, on Will’s left, looking at El’s own bed from across Will’s still body.  
  
His jaw creaks as he opens his mouth to talk, rusty from constant clenching and voice gritty from lack of use.  
  
“You have to wake up,” he begs them, squeezing the hand he hadn’t realized he’d picked up off of Will’s bed. His fingers look frail and pale. Vulnerable. “Will,” he says, before casting a look over to El. “El. Wake up. Please. We… I need to know if you did it. I need to know if you’re okay, if you’re free.”  
  
If this were a movie, as tears slide down Mike’s face and onto the sheets draped over Will’s stone-cold form, they’d wake up. They’d get the color back in their cheeks, their eyes would open.  
  
But it’s not a movie, and they stay asleep.

* * *

**_Day 4_ **

There’s no fanfare, no wild plot twist when they wake up. What happens is this:

Will’s eyes slide open, as easily as if waking up from a nap. “Sorry,” he says to the ceiling as Mike freezes in his chair. “We had to make sure it was dead, and watch the Upside Down burn.”

“We didn’t mean to worry you,” El agrees from her own bed, unmoving. “We didn’t know if this would happen. Or how long it would take.”

“But we’re back,” Will reports rather cheerfully. “And I also can’t get up. I guess that happens when you’re in a coma.”

Mike feels his mouth flap open. He shuts it, then opens it again to say something.

“What the fuck?”

* * *

**_Day 5_ **  
  
Maybe they’re wired for loss, he suggests to El. Maybe all humans, or perhaps just their family—maybe there’s just some cosmic force that sets them up for tragedy and fulfills all expectations to the maximum.  
  
She stares at her arm as he talks, as he chatters away at her bedside, quietly as to not wake Will up, and only once he’s done does she speak.  
  
“I don’t think we’re wired for it,” she says, softly, the only way she knows how. “I think this is just how the world is, and we exist in it.” Her fingers brush over the dark mark on her wrist, the black brand that mars otherwise unbroken skin.  
  
That’s when he understands: more than anyone else, El knows.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says. He wonders what he’s sorry for, briefly—maybe for them, for the way they fell apart and then fell back together, filling the puzzle back in eventually but with ragged edges that don’t quite fit the way they used to. Maybe for the hardship she has gone through, the suffering Mike pushed her into when he dragged her into their quest to find his best friend all those years ago.  
  
Maybe he’s sorry for the losses she has suffered, the losses he sees but doesn’t understand—maybe he’s sorry about the others.  
  
She stares at her number, steel in her eyes, before she looks up at him. “Don’t be,” she says. “It’s not over yet.”

* * *

**_Day 12_ **

Mike doesn’t really sleep at home anymore. He wakes up screaming more often than not, and with Nancy back at school in Vermont, he doesn’t have anyone in the house to talk to at three in the morning—he doesn’t want to disturb Holly and he _certainly_ doesn’t want to discuss it with his parents.

No, it’s infinitely easier to let himself into the Byers-Hopper house in the middle of the night with the key Will has trusted him with. It’s infinitely easier for Mike to crash on the couch and remember that at least _this_ house is full of people who care about him, know him, _understand_. It’s infinitely easier to seek out the light he so desperately craves to chase away the shadows, and it’s ironically easy to find it in people shrouded the most in darkness.

And it’s infinitely harder to gather up the courage to step into Will’s room and collapse into a nest of blankets on the floor, but it makes his fitful sleep just a little more fulfilling when he knows that the best thing that has ever happened to him is alive and breathing not even two feet away.

* * *

**_Day 18_ **

El and Will handle stress in very different ways.

When a sophomore boy leers at El, she snarls right back at him. When a locker door slams, Will jumps.

Mike thinks it has a lot to do with the environments they were raised in. El was a lab rat in a cage, fighting to be seen, to be heard, to _attack_ . Will has always been a ghostly boy in school, and the rumors about him don’t help. Though Troy and James are a thing of the past, Mike hears the whispers and sees staring, and though he wishes he were like El—wishes he could glare at these assholes and get them to _stop_ —he’s grown up like Will and he wilts away instead.

All this to say that Mike isn’t looking forward to having to return to school.

* * *

**_Day 31_ **

Mike stops in the middle of the hall, squinting through the dark. There’s something on the floor in front of him that he almost tripped on while on his way to the bathroom. Then it moves, and Mike realizes it’s _alive_.

“Mike?” a small voice whispers from the floor.

“El?” he whispers back, dropping to his knees. “What are you doing out here?”

The bundle on the floor shifts again and Mike realizes it’s _two_ people, not just El.

“Mike, why are you awake?” Will asks, and though Mike still can’t see through the dark too well, he knows Will’s stare is piercing right through it.

“Bathroom,” he says. “Why—what are _you_ doing?” He reiterates the question when a few moments pass and neither of them answer.

“I… saw something,” El finally admits. “Someone.”

Mike is instantly on edge. “Here? In your house?”

“No, no,” she assures him. “In my head. I saw… people. Someone I knew, and some others I didn’t.”

“And I heard them,” Will continues. “We were trying to figure out what it meant.”

Mike opens his mouth to respond, but then El’s fingers clamp around his wrist and he startles.

“Wait,” she hisses. “He hears them.”

As if on cue, Will begins to mumble, short and nonsensical phrases tumbling from his lips. Mike only manages to hear _chasing after me for days_ , _have to find her_ , and _sister_. He says “sister” multiple times, and though it means nothing to him, if the way El’s fingernails are digging into his skin is any indication, it means something to her.

Will continues to relay the words of people who are faceless to Mike, and he just listens and waits for his friend to return.

* * *

**_Day 37_ **

El’s brand is easy to see, dark on her wrist. Mike wonders how she doesn’t hate it, and can only assume that she wears it as a symbol of her fortitude.

Will has his own mark, his own scars, but none compare to the large burn on his side from the fire poker all those years ago. It’s black and it looks like it still is fresh, flame and lightning trapped under his skin.

Dustin has a smattering of dark freckles on his face that aren’t freckles at all; instead they are acidic marks spit right from the tunnels of the Upside Down. Lucas and Max both sport deep cuts and lashes on their arms and necks from their last run-in with Billy. All of the older teenagers and adults have nicks and scratches and bites.

Mike wonders how long it’ll be until the scars fade, if they do at all.

As for himself, well. He escaped relatively unscathed, but he still wakes every night screaming, silently or not, curled in on himself. And even as Jonathan and Nancy’s matching knife cuts heal and disappear, Mike’s demons don’t.

He wonders how long it’ll be until _those_ scars fade, too.

* * *

**_Day 38_ **

Sometimes, he hurts so bad he goes numb, and he thinks he’ll never be able to feel again.

* * *

**_Day 49_**  

“El!” he shouts, covering his face with his arms as he tears through the foliage. “Will!”

El is long gone, and Will had taken off after her, leaving Mike to stumble after them with Lucas, Dustin, and Max on his heels.

“Is this even the right direction?” Dustin yells, stumbling over a tree root.

Mike doesn’t even bother answering. _It has to be,_ he tells himself instead. _They have to be here_.

They tumble through a tangle of brush and Mike collides with something—someone.

“Mike!” Will yells as he topples over, limbs completely entangled with Mike’s.

“Sorry, sorry!” Mike responds, scrambling off of his friend. Lucas, Dustin and Max gather around them, all immediately firing questions at Will.

“What’s going on?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Where’s El?”

Will only answers the third one, panic in his eyes. “I don’t know where she went,” he chokes out. “We need to find her.” He squeezes his eyes shut, and Mike holds his breath, knowing he’s looking for her. They’re connected, after all.

“Well?” Max prompts after a moment, impatient as always, and Will’s eyelids flutter open. His face contorts into a confused frown.

“She’s—”

“Here,” El says, voice tight and carefully neutral as she emerges from some shadowy corner of the woods.

There’s a girl in her arms: Mike’s first impression is that she’s _dark_. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes.

Then he realizes that she’s not breathing.

Lucas makes a sputtering noise behind him, seemingly arriving to the same conclusion in that exact moment. “Is she…?”

“Dead,” Will finishes, voice barely above a whisper.

“My sister,” El replies.

* * *

**_Day 50_ **

Mike knows grief.

But, he realizes as he stares out the window, he doesn’t know it like _she_ does.

Outside, the wind whips the rain against the window, distorting his view. He’s almost thankful for it, though, because he’s not sure if his sanity would survive an unobstructed view of all of this.

El rages outside, tree limbs bending and rocks flying. The howling of the storm is too loud for Mike to hear anything else, but he’s sure El is screaming, too. The waves of rage and sorrow are radiating off of her, not enough to influence how Mike acts but enough so that he feels what she does.

Will sits against a tree just a few feet away from her, the only thing untouched for miles. All of El’s damage and even the rain seem to bounce off of him, and he just watches El with dark eyes.

Mike knows that compared to El, compared to Will, he knows _nothing_. He wonders if he’s ever _felt_ anything as intensely as El has. He doubts it. He doubts he could handle it.

He turns away from the window, because if he watches any longer, if he feels El’s pain for even just another second, he’ll cry. Instead, he collapses onto the Byers’ couch and takes hold of a picture sitting on the coffee table, bringing it closer.

It’s a picture of the Party, sitting around a picnic blanket with a board game set on top of it. Mike remembers that night: the Fourth of July, two years ago. Even with all they had gone through up until that point, Mike misses it. It seems like a much simpler time: before the monster had returned, before they knew about the Other Subjects, before anyone _else_ had died.

Mike thinks he was happy in this snapshot; at least a little. He knows he felt _something_.

Then his eyes skid across the picture to focus on Will’s face, his eyes bright and mouth curved into a gentle smile, and he notices a stir in his chest.

Maybe—hopefully—he’s not out of time just yet. Maybe he knows how to feel something _good_ , if he looks in the right place.

* * *

**_Day 63_ ** ****  
  
The buzz of electricity still lingers on his face, and he struggles to gather his thoughts for a moment.  
  
“Will,” he finally says. Breathes, more like—the name leaves his mouth like a whisper, and Will gives him this look like he wants to swallow it down. His bright eyes glint in the dark as he smiles.  
  
“Mike,” he whispers back, teasing.  
  
Mike is struck, then, by the full and sudden understanding of what he’s doing, what _they’re_ doing. He almost pulls back— _almost_ , because then he is struck by Will’s sharp features in the dim moonlight, the way the dark flecks stand out in his irises, and he’s frozen.  
  
Will’s smile fades slightly the longer the silence stretches on, replaced by a worried look. His fingers tighten on Mike’s jaw. Mike almost jolts as a rush of static passes through him, but that might just be because Will is looking so intently at him. “Mike,” Will says again. “Are you okay?” He hesitates. “Is this okay?”  
  
And Mike almost scoffs, because of course it’s okay. He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t okay. He’d be pulling away right now, or even long gone already. But he’s not—he’s _not_ .  
  
There are other things, too, like how jumbled his feelings are about this boy, _a boy_ , his best friend. _Will_.  
  
But there’s no good way to explain it, and to quash Will’s worries, there’s no better way than to kiss him.  
  
So Mike does.

* * *

**_Day 78_ **

“Let him go,” El growls, and the fingers clamp more tightly on Mike’s head.

“Don’t come any closer, 011,” his captor warns. “Or I’ll kill him before I kill you.”

“006,” El says. “Please. You _know_ me. You know what Papa has done. Why help him?”

006’s fingers tremble, pressed against Mike’s temples. “I have to. He’s near, he’s watching. He’s in control. I have to.”

“I can’t let you hurt him,” El warns, though she remains unmoving. “Please, 006. Let him go. It’s me you want. Not him.”

“I can’t do that,” 006 replies simply, and Mike watches El’s jaw clench.

“Tell me one thing,” she says, and 006 must give her a signal to continue. “Kali. 008. Was she the first one you killed?”

“No,” 006 says. “But _you_ will be the last.”

There’s a sharp _crack_ and then the hands fall away from Mike’s head, a blast propelling him a few steps forward. El catches him and pushes him onto his feet, eyes wide, staring in shock over his shoulder.

Will stands in the spot where 006 had been, fists clenched. The air around him pops and crackles with static, and when he shifts, Mike can see tiny sparks appear.

“Sorry I took so long,” he says.  
****

* * *

**_Day 83_ **

“No,” Dustin says the minute El closes her mouth. “No way. You spent so long trying to get out of there, and now you want to go back _in_?.”

“He’s in there,” she says quietly. “He’s sick. He’s hurting. There’s… there’s a dark cloud around him. Even if… even if he hurt so many people, we can’t just leave him there.”

Mike’s heart hurts for this girl, this damaged child who he can’t stand to see in harm’s way. “What if it’s a trap?” he proposes hesitantly. “What if he’s trying to lure you in?”

She shakes her head. “I’d sense it, I think.” There’s an undercurrent of doubt to her voice, but her eyes are wide and searching for support.

She finds it in Will. He looks around their circle, sort of sizes them all up. “We have to try,” he agrees, and the air crackles with the intensity of his electric gaze.

Max laughs without humor, turning her eyes to her worn sneakers. “When? Not tonight. Don’t say tonight.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lucas says. “She wouldn’t do that.” There’s a note of worry in his tone, like he doesn’t quite believe it himself.

El nods vigorously in agreement. “Not tonight,” she confirms. “Tomorrow.”

* * *

**_Day 84_ **  
  
Mike takes in a shaky breath as he presses himself back flat against the wall, trying to keep quiet.  
  
“I know you’re out there, Eleven,” Brenner’s voice taunts. “You too, Byers, and the rest of your friends. I know you can hear me.”  
  
There’s a lilt in his voice that can’t smother the undeniable intelligence this man clearly possesses—but it does wonders to enhance the large degree of insanity Mike is sure he has. He barely restrains himself from looking around the corner to see if Brenner is coming after him, instead opting to look across the hall diagonal from him where Will is hiding.  
  
What is so terrifying about _this_ encounter isn’t the disgraced scientist himself—it’s the fact that at any moment, Mike could lose Will. He’s being directly targeted; there’s so much that could go wrong.  
  
He pushes that thought aside.  
  
He quirks an eyebrow at his boyfriend, trying to communicate a thought: _where’s El?_  
  
Will doesn’t reply. He squeezes his eyes shut—and almost immediately opens them again. When he looks back at Mike, shaking his head, his face is full of fear.

Mike understands in a heartbeat: Will, for all his skills, is blind in the building.  
  
He checks his watch just as it changes from 11:59.

* * *

**_Day 85_ ** ****  
  
It’s 12:00 am, and they’re fucked.  
  
They’re cornered in the maze-like halls of the creepiest lab in the world by a scientist definitely not in his right mind. There’s no way out—the door behind Mike is locked, and there’s no possible way he can get across to the open hallway behind Will.  
  
His heart sinks.  
  
_Go,_ he tries to tell Will silently, even if Will’s powers don’t work in the facility. _Save yourself._  
  
And then his heart manages to sink even further, somehow, when Will sets his jaw and shakes his head. **_Get ready,_ ** his voice echoes suddenly in Mike’s head, layered with bass tones, so loud he almost falls.  
  
“ _No_ ,” he tries to say, accidentally says out loud, and then Brenner’s footsteps change in direction.  
  
That’s when Will moves, fluid and fast, and suddenly a dark wall envelopes the whole corridor.  
  
“Run!” he yells, but Mike is frozen.  
  
“Fascinating,” Brenner simply intones, inspecting the barrier. “I thought I had prevented any of these abilities harbored by you experiments from being used.”  
  
“Good thing these aren’t mine, then,” Will says through gritted teeth. “Go, Mike, run! Find them!”  
  
Finally he uproots himself from where he’s stuck and bolts, leaving his heart behind in that dark hallway. He sprints up the stairs, shouting his friends’ names at random, trying to find any of them.  
  
He barrels straight into Dustin one floor up, sending both of them sprawling.  
  
“What the hell, Mike!” Dustin yells, but there’s no time.  
  
“Will’s cornered by Brenner downstairs,” he pants, scrambling to his feet. “The power negation isn’t working on his shadow stuff for some reason, but it won’t hold forever. Where’s El?”  
  
“She went down to the other wing,” Max’s voice rings out from his left as she emerges from another stairwell. “She’s heading right back to where Will is, and Lucas isn’t that far behind her.”  
  
Mike immediately turns and runs back down the stairs. “Shit.”  
  
He hears Dustin and Max scrambling after him, but he’s only focused on one thing: _Will Will Will WillWillWillWill—_  
  
He knocks the door open with his shoulder, wincing, and skids to a stop.  
  
Will is still standing there, arms outstretched, and the shadowy wall is still up, but it’s flickering. “I… I can’t hold it forever,” he forces through gritted teeth. “It’s the m-monster’s, not mine, a-and I’m run-ning out.”  
  
Brenner smirks, face now clearly visible through the thinning shield. “So that explains why you can do this,” he muses. “Residual power from your possession, perhaps? I assume you’ve kept this little amount saved up—but again, what a little amount. It’s only a matter of time before these tricks are gone and the suppressors will render you defenseless.”  
  
“Jesus,” Max mumbles from behind Mike. “He’s smart.”  
  
“And insane,” Dustin reminds her.  
  
Mike ignores them. “Will,” he says lowly. “If you drop this, can you make a run for it?”  
  
A bead of sweat rolls down Will’s face. “I—I don’t know.” He swallows, hard. “I just. You need to get out of here. When this falls, Brenner will get through, and when this falls, I—I’m not sure what the monster could do. This is all I have left of Him.” The shield flickers violently, and Will curses. “It’s coming down. There’s no time.”  
  
“I love you,” Mike says as though it might help. As though they’re not about to die.  
  
“I love you, too,” Will returns, finally looking him in the eye, and Mike’s heart skips a beat for a reason that isn’t even terror. Will is pale and sweaty and his hair is sticking to his forehead. He has a bruise blossoming on his cheek from an early brush with the lab’s defenses. There’s shadow pooling at his fingertips, bringing all attention to the fact that he is inextricably linked to a monster.  
  
And Mike loves him. If they’re going to die, so be it—it’s the first time ever their deaths could possibly be together.  
  
He’s practically resigned himself to it, _accepted_ it, when—  
  
_Bang!_  
  
Brenner drops like a brick. Will, startled, drops his shield. And on the other side of the hallway is El, eyes dark and stormy, feet planted firmly on the floor with a gun extended in front of her. Her finger is on the trigger.  
  
“No more,” she says lowly, gaze fixed on her former captor’s still body. “I ended it.”  
  
Lucas, standing behind El, is the first to gather his wits.  
  
“Holy shit,” he proclaims.

* * *

**_Day 86_ **

They’re all fucked up kids. They’re all patched up quilts of chaos, pieces of who they were stitched together with trauma and pain and age to the people they’re becoming. They’re not the works of art Will portrays them as in his sketchbook. They’re not heroes as Mike sets them up to be in their games. They’re not special—not even El or Will, not really. They’re all just shattered teenagers, stooping to pick up the pieces before they can glue them back together as best they can.

So yeah, Mike muses as he pulls out his notebook to jot down the thought. Maybe they’re all a little broken, but that’s how the light gets in.

* * *

**_Day 89_ ** ****  
  
Sometimes, he hurts so bad he goes numb, and he thinks he’ll never be able to feel again.  
  
Then he makes Will laugh, watches his head tip back and his shoulders shake, and the world blossoms into screaming color.

* * *

**_Day… oh, who cares anymore? There’s more to life than counting days, a lesson understood best by the people who have always felt their days are numbered._ ** ****  
  
It ends, fittingly, with Will.  
  
Mike should have known: for him, everything starts with Will. Mike might be the leader of the group, but Will is the guiding hand, the one who sets a precedent for the others. He made a move first, followed by Mike. He got up to leave for the monster first, the others trailing behind. Hell, even earlier: Will went to the Upside Down first, and all of them chased after him. Even in the very beginning, in kindergarten, when Will said yes to being Mike’s friend—maybe that’s when all this really started.  
  
And to Mike, it’s never been more obvious how this story was always supposed to end.  
  
Max whoops as she races down the road on her skateboard, El running after her. Dustin and Lucas are in the car, weaving slowly down the street, music blasting from the rolled-down windows.  
  
And Will—well, when Mike turns around, he sees Will standing motionless in the middle of the road, face turned to the sky and eyes closed.  
  
_Like a sunflower,_ his mind supplies idly as he takes a few steps back to touch his boyfriend’s shoulder gently. “Hey.”  
  
Will doesn’t startle, doesn’t even move or open his eyes. The sun, just barely beginning to set, casts a golden light across Will’s sharp features. He’s beautiful. “Hi.”

“You doing alright?” Mike asks cautiously.  
  
Finally, Will looks at him. “Never better,” he says smoothly, honestly, openly. “I just. This is it, huh?”  
  
And somehow that makes sense to Mike, so he nods. Will smiles at him, radiant, and Mike’s chest feels tight. “I love you,” he says.  
  
“I love you, too,” Will says easily, like it’s not hard, like no matter how many times he says it Mike won’t feel overwhelmed by his own emotions.  
  
Their friends are pulling ahead now, getting lost in the sun’s rays and the trees bracketing the road, and Mike takes Will’s hand. Gestures forward. “Shall we?”  
  
Will’s smile has melted from blinding to a more subdued, peaceful one, and he squeezes Mike’s hand as an answer.  
  
Mike follows the sound of his friends’ laughter as he pulls the love of his life after him.  
  
After all, it ends with Will.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are, as always, appreciated.  
> find me on tumblr, my main is [@willelbyers](https://willelbyers.tumblr.com) and my writing blog is [@lowriting](https://lowriting.tumblr.com)!


End file.
